Clinical computing in a teaching hospital

Abstract This report describes a hospital-wide clinical computing system that permits physicians, nurses, medical students, and other health workers to retrieve data from the clinical laboratories; to look up reports from the departments of radiology and pathology; to look up demographic data and outpatient visits; to look up prescriptions filled in the outpatient pharmacy; to perform bibliographic retrieval of the MEDLINE data base; to read, write, retract, edit, and forward electronic mail; and to request delivery of a patient's chart. During a one-week study period, from 300 video display terminals located throughout the hospital, 818 patient care providers used a common registry of 539,000 patients to look up clinical and laboratory data 16,768 times; 477 other hospital workers used the patient registry 46,579 times. In a separate study of 586 health care providers, 470 (80 per cent) indicated that they used computer terminals "most of the time" to look up laboratory results; in contrast, 48 (8 per ce...